Archive for the ‘White House’ Category

See below for a guest post from MFAN Executive Committee Member and Accountability Working Group Co-Chair Diana Ohlbaum.

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In his graduation speech at West Point on Wednesday, President Obama laid out a national security doctrine based on partnership, multilateralism, international law, diplomacy and development. Explaining how democracy, free markets, and respect for human rights abroad benefit us here at home, he asserted: “Foreign assistance is not an afterthought, something nice to do apart from our national defense, apart from our national security. It is part of what makes us strong.”

Development advocates and practitioners have often resisted justifying their work on national security grounds, fearing that development objectives would be sacrificed on the altar of security imperatives. But now the tables have turned: for the first time, there is high-level understanding that effective development is imperative if we are to meet our security objectives.

The U.S. Global Development Council is perfectly positioned to take advantage of this opening to institutionalize development as a full partner, alongside diplomacy and defense, in our national security triad. But the President didn’t mention the Council in his speech, and the Council doesn’t seem to have security on its radar screen.

1) The recommendations themselves were neither new nor particularly controversial. The idea of creating a Development Finance Bank was proposed in 2011 by Todd Moss and Ben Leo; the road to harnessing the private sector was paved by USAID through its Global Development Alliances, now expanded into the Global Development Lab; the calls for greater transparency and more rigorous evaluations of impact have been issued by MFAN since Gayle Smith was among its leaders. The fact that some of these have failed to gain traction with Congress and the Administration ought to have given the Council some pause: what are the underlying obstacles that prevent these ideas from being realized, and how can we, as a Council, work to resolve them?

2) The purpose and value of the Council as an institution remains unclear. As John Norris and Noam Unger noted after the Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development announced that the Council would be formed, there was little initial guidance about its aims. Beyond a statement that the Council was to provide high-level input relevant to the work of United States Government agencies”, nothing was said about its objectives or authorities. The Executive Order creating the Council added more details: the Council was to “inform the policy and practice of U.S. global development policy and programs by providing advice to the President and other senior officials,” “support new and existing public-private partnerships,” and “increase awareness and action in support of development.” All of these functions are currently being carried out by USAID (including through the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid) and the National Security Council, so what is the Global Development Council’s added value?

3) The public outreach function is at odds with the private advice function. If the Council’s sole task were to provide advice to the President and senior officials, then it could play an important role in promoting policy coherence and addressing the “hot button” political issues of tax, trade, and agricultural policy that have such important ramifications for global development. But, understandably, the Administration is reluctant to give outsiders a peek into such sensitive policy decisions. On the flip side, the fact that the Council makes its recommendations to the President renders it unwilling or unable to conduct its work transparently and with broad public participation, which would be necessary for the Council to serve as a bridge between the public and private sectors. Sadly, its dual mission has in some ways forced the Council to adopt the worst of both worlds.

Whither the Council?

There is one function that is absolutely essential to the future of development as a central pillar of U.S. foreign policy, and which is not currently being carried out by any U.S. government or outside entity of which I am aware: an exploration of WHY development is important to U.S. national security. Sure, we all have our slogans and talking points about the relationship between global development and U.S. jobs and exports, conflict and instability, health, migration, climate change, and so forth, but how much of it has actually been quantified through scientific research, or built into a compelling narrative that can be easily explained to the average American citizen? As anyone who has ever tried to pitch foreign aid to the public surely knows, it’s an uphill battle. It takes time and effort, and there’s ample evidence that people simply ignore facts that don’t fit within their existing belief system. But if we’re ever to get beyond the third-class status accorded development and begin treating it as a national security and foreign policy imperative, we need to demonstrate exactly why that’s the case – including, but not exclusively, because it reflects our moral values. This is a job that the Global Development Council, as a public-private initiative, is uniquely positioned to perform.

To fulfill this mission, the Council would need to take a multi-pronged approach: research, to discover what we know and don’t know about the relationship between development and national security; recommendations to the President about the “spill-over” effects of our non-aid policies (such as trade, energy, environment, agriculture, tax, and arms sales) on global development; outreach and collaboration with the private sector to get the messages out and the policies right; turning the West Point speech and the soon-to-be-released National Security Strategy into actionable steps for development; and bringing the message to the American public through the Presidential Conference on Global Development that the Council has recommended.

That would not only put the meat on the bones of the Obama Doctrine, it would breathe new life into a Council that has otherwise failed to excite.

See below for a guest post from MFAN Honorary Co-Chairs former Senator Richard Lugar, former Representative Howard Berman, and former Representative Jim Kolbe. This piece originally appeared on The Hill.

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In 2008 a group of foreign policy luminaries issued a proposal to promote a “fresh, smart approach to U.S. foreign policy and engagement in the world.” As the name of their new coalition implied, the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) sought to reform a foreign aid system that was badly outdated and poorly equipped to meet the challenges of the 21st century. MFAN offered a set of core principles and priority actions for making foreign assistance more effective, more efficient, and better at serving our national interests. Their ideas inspired each of us to engage in foreign aid reform from our individual leadership positions within and outside of Congress.

Over the intervening six years, notable progress has been made. Both the President’s Policy Directive on Global Development and the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review sought to elevate the role of global development in our foreign policy, and to adopt a more evidence-based and results-oriented approach to aid. For the first time ever, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) launched high-quality, scientifically rigorous evaluations of their work, geared toward identifying lessons that could be applied to future programming. Secretary Clinton committed the United States to participation in the International Aid Transparency Initiative, and in 2013 the MCC was ranked by Publish What You Fund’s Aid Transparency Index as the most transparent donor organization in the world. USAID refocused its work by driving game-changing innovations, using science and technology to solve age-old challenges, creating new and improved partnerships, and rebuilding its own human capital in order to demonstrate real results. And while these changes have not yet been codified, the hard work has been done to prepare comprehensive reform legislation that transforms the unsustainable donor-recipient relationship into one of equal partners working toward mutually agreed upon and beneficial goals.

In light of this progress, and recognizing the many challenges that still remain, this year MFAN has reconstituted itself and is launching “The Way Forward: A Reform Agenda for 2014 and Beyond” – its vision of the future of foreign aid, and its recommendations for the next steps to get there. As Honorary Co-Chairs of MFAN, we support its sharpened focus on two interrelated areas where progress will have the greatest impact: accountability and ownership.

While these two concepts may not be well-understood outside a small circle of development experts, MFAN’s task will be to broaden awareness of their inextricable links to effective development and to each other. “Accountability” through transparency, evaluation and learning is, in effect, a feedback loop that strengthens public engagement in order to improve program results. By revealing exactly how funds are being spent, aid transparency enables stakeholders to monitor implementation and provide real-time information that can be used to avoid corruption and to better reach those in need. Conducting independent evaluations that not only measure simple outputs (such as number of teachers trained or wells drilled) but actual impacts (such as improved reading skills or reduced disease burden) will help us to determine which programs bring the greatest bang for the buck, and how. The lessons that are learned through greater transparency and rigorous evaluations must then be fed back into the system to guide spending decisions and improve program design.

“Ownership” is both a result of accountability and a pre-requisite for it. Our local partners will not feel responsible for making programs work if they are not part of the decision-making process, and they cannot be part of the decision-making process without detailed information about our aid budgets, plans and activities. Too often in the past, aid decisions were made without considering the views and capabilities of local partners and beneficiaries, and without engaging them in program implementation. Yet if there is one thing that we have learned from experience, it is that doing for is not nearly as helpful as doing with. Ultimately, our goal is for developing countries to become self-reliant, with governments that answer to the people and vibrant economies that expand opportunities and hope for all – especially women and others who have been marginalized and excluded. To succeed in this effort we must heed local priorities, use local systems, and leverage local resources.

Applying the principles of accountability and country ownership to our aid programs will help poor countries to take responsibility for their own development, and will help citizens of our own country to feel confident that their taxpayer dollars are being well spent. MFAN’s new agenda sets out a list of criteria and benchmarks for judging how well U.S. foreign assistance conforms to these principles, and its member organizations will continue to work both at home and abroad to put these principles into practice. We look forward to working together on this new way forward.

Richard G. Lugar, a former Republican senator from Indiana and chairman of the Agriculture and Foreign Relations Committees, runs TheLugarCenter.org. Howard L. Berman, a former Democratic congressman from California and chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, serves as a senior advisor at Covington & Burling. Jim Kolbe, a former member of Congress, is a Senior Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund and Senior Adviser at McLarty Associates. The three serve as Honorary Co-Chairs of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN).

See below for a post from Connie Veillette, Senior Fellow for Global Food Security and Aid Effectiveness at The Lugar Center and MFAN Co-Chair.

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The President’s Global Development Council (GDC) released a much awaited report (Beyond Business as Usual) April 14 calling for a focus on the private sector, innovation, transparency and evidence, climate smart food security, and global leadership. Many of its points coincide with current thinking in development quarters, one of which is the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network’s (MFAN) new policy paper.

The wait for a GDC product has been exceedingly lengthy. The Council was born out of the President’s Policy Directive on Global Development issued way back in 2010. I should note here that many of us hailed the PPD for its emphasis on transparency, country ownership, and even more selectivity and focus in funding choices. One can see many of its principles reflected in U.S. development programs, although not to the level that many of us expected four years hence. From 2010 until GDC members were named in 2012, the development community waited. Once the members were named, a new waiting game began for what the council would do and how it would do it. But two years later, they have issued a fine report.

Now what? The GDC was created to “provide high-level input relevant to the work of United States Government agencies.” The report notes that it “will also explore other areas moving forward.” This is a good thing for a number of reasons.

First, while I agree that the GDC focus areas are important, and some are downright crucial, I would suggest that the Council left out a particularly difficult but nonetheless critical issue, that of country ownership. The vast majority of the development community believes in the value of building local capacity and in engaging governments, business, and civil society in creating and implementing development strategies. However, there is considerable disagreement on how best to do this. There is even disagreement on such an elementary question as what country ownership means. MFAN has formed a working group on this very issue. Our goal is to help inform this dialogue within the administration, Congress, aid implementers, and the public.

Second, time is running out. A GDC goal is to help institutionalize many PPD principals within government agencies. It is quite conceivable that GDC can continue into the next administration, but there are no guarantees. GDC should be operating within the premise that its work is done by the end of 2016. Given the administration’s track record in getting the panel named and up and running, and then the fits and starts of the Council over the last two years, my concerns seem merited.

Third, do we really need another conference? And who is the audience? And will the administration want to lead an effort that would require huge investments in stature, planning, funding, partnerships, etc. in order to have much of an effect on U.S. public opinion? (Are we talking about annual Farm Aid concerts that have raised public awareness of the value of American farmers?) Such an event may be fun for attendees, but better value may be found in working on identifying best practices and helping U.S. agencies implement them. As the report notes…”The Council will place particular emphasis on identifying successful approaches to inclusive and sustainable development and will be open about those approaches that don’t work.” Hallelujah.

President Barack Obama issued the US government’s first ever US Global Development Policy in September 2010. The policy clarifies that the primary purpose of US development aid is to pursue broad-based economic growth as the means to fight global poverty.

USAID Forwardis a flagship reform agenda designed to make USAID more transparent, effective, and accountable to US taxpayers and to people overseas.

The issue:USAID Forward addresses outdated procurement policies that perpetuate a cycle of aid dependence, rebuilding staff technical capacity, the reduction of overhead costs associated with contracting by 12–15 percent, the need for rigorous program feedback and evaluation, and finally, the role of innovation, science, and technology throughout USAID’s programs. At the heart of this reform process is acknowledging the leading role that local people and institutions have in transforming their countries.

The results: Since USAID Forward began, USAID has increased the amount of direct support to governments and to citizens and other leaders and problems solvers in host countries by almost 50 percent. In fiscal year 2010, only 9.7 percent of USAID mission funding was awarded directly to host country government agencies, private-sector firms, and local NGOs. In 2013, 14.3 percent of mission funds were awarded directly to these local institutions, which is halfway toward USAID’s goal of 30 percent by fiscal year 2015.

The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) is a United States foreign aid agency that is applying a new philosophy towards foreign aid. Introduced by President George W. Bush and established by Congress in 2004, the MCC model requires countries to meet eligibility criteria in three areas: good governance, economic freedom, and investments in people. In return, the MCC provides large, five-year grants (“compacts”) toward development projects that are identified along with representatives from the host country government, private sector, and civil society and that are assessed on the basis of expected economic returns and other technical criteria.

The results: In 2012, almost 9.4 million acres—a land area nearly double that of New Jersey—came under improved cultivation and management practices due to Feed the Future investments, supporting seven million food producers. In Senegal for example, the use of conservation farming techniques resulted in at least a 20 percent increase in yields of maize, millet, and sorghum from 2011 to 2012.

See below for a guest post from Diana Ohlbaum, Nonresident Senior Associate of the Project on Prosperity and Development at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and MFAN Executive Committee Member. Ohlbaum writes about what she’d like to see included in the 2014 National Security Strategy. This original post can be found on CSIS’s blog.

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President Obama announced last fall that he intends to release a new National Security Strategy (NSS) in early 2014, updating the previous version, published in 2010. Given that these strategies generally function more as public relations documents than as guiding doctrines, and that 2014 is a high-stakes election year, it may be unreasonable to expect anything risky or bold. But if the 2014 NSS were to put a clear stamp on U.S. foreign policy and articulate a principled vision of our role in the world, here are a few of the things it ought to say:

#1: Explain why development is important to our national security.

The 3 Ds doctrine – defense, diplomacy and development – has long been de rigeur in Washington’s foreign policy circles. But the 52-page 2010 National Security Strategydevotes all of 5 paragraphs to sustainable development. There is no clear articulation of why sustainable development is important to U.S. national security and national interests.

The 2010 NSS contains only one sentence that addresses the link between sustainable development and national security, which was then cited in the 2010 Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR): “Through an aggressive and affirmative development agenda and commensurate resources, we can strengthen the regional partners we need to help us stop conflict and counter global criminal networks; build a stable, inclusive global economy with new sources of prosperity; advance democracy and human rights; and ultimately position ourselves to better address key global challenges ….”[emphasis added].

This is quite an incredible statement when you think about it. It is not saying that development will create more markets for U.S. exports or level the playing field for American workers. It is not saying that development reduces the risk of pandemic disease or the impact of environmental change. It doesn’t say that good governance, transparency and accountability are effective antidotes to transnational crime or that they reduce the risk of violent conflict. What it says, in effect is: development creates better partners who will do our bidding for us. Is that the message we want to send the world about why development is important?

#2: Development assistance is not a lever of American policy and influence.

This is probably the most bitter pill to swallow. But if we are to help bring about lasting gains, swallow it we must. The United States has other types of aid – Economic Support Funds and billions of dollars of security assistance — that are designed for political ends.

That doesn’t mean, however, that development assistance should ignore politics: in fact, poor governance, weak institutions, and unaccountable processes may be the largest obstacles to growth. However, there is a difference between using development assistance to build more inclusive and capable institutions for the benefit of local partners and stakeholders, and using it to achieve short-term foreign policy gains for ourselves.

Development assistance is, plain and simple, an investment in a better, safer world. And it ought to be designed to achieve maximum development outcomes. We are finally starting to learn the lessons of 50 years of development assistance, such as the importance of data transparency, program monitoring and evaluation, clear strategies with measurable goals, country ownership, use of local systems, and harmonization with other donors. Let’s not abandon those lessons by attempting to leverage aid for short-term diplomatic gains – which doesn’t usually work, anyway.

#3: Development isn’t only about aid.

It’s high time we started recognizing that aid is only a small drop in the bucket when we talk about resources for development. Foreign direct investment, remittances, and domestic resources are all larger than official development assistance, and private philanthropy is rapidly growing as well. CSIS’s Project on Prosperity and Development recently released a report examining the ways that the private sector can engage emerging markets.

This doesn’t mean that aid isn’t important – it just means that our development policy must be broader than an aid policy. And once we start talking about a broader development policy we find two elephants in the room: trade and tax.

Our agricultural and trade policies were not touched on at all as a part of the 2010 Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development precisely because of their political sensitivity. But we are probably doing more damage to developing countries through our farm subsidies and trade quotas and tariffs than we are helping through our aid. Such protectionist policies cause poor countries to lose potential jobs and export revenues, and create significant price distortions on their domestic markets, undermining the value of our assistance. The new Farm Bill and FY 2014 Omnibus Appropriations bill take some baby steps toward a more enlightened food aid program, and the Administration proposes to expand on these in its FY 2015 budget, but more comprehensive reforms are in order.

Second is the issue of illicit financial flows. Washington hasn’t quite woken up to the fact that the total volume of aid going in to the developing world pales in comparison to the amounts being siphoned out. In fact, according to a report by the Africa Progress Panel, chaired by Kofi Annan, Africa loses more each year through illicit outflows than it receives in external aid and foreign direct investment combined. Global Financial Integrity estimates that nearly $1 trillion was drained out of the global “south” in 2011 (the last year for which statistics are available) – roughly 10 times the amount these nations received in official development assistance.

Some of this is due to plain old corruption – bribes, kickbacks and embezzlement, pure and simple. But the vast majority of this is due to tax evasion – in essence, cheating countries out of their own natural and financial resources. Developing countries are estimated to lose $120-160 billion each year of potential tax revenue from their own citizens who hide their wealth offshore. And the United States is directly complicit in that, by allowing the registration of untraceable corporations that are the primary vehicle for money laundering, tax evasion, and hiding the profits of transnational crime.

Addressing this problem is essential not only to enable low and middle income countries to finance their own development, but also as a matter of our own national security. The same laws and policies that make it easy to move, hide, and use dirty money are used by all types of transnational criminals, including drug lords, terrorists, gun runners, sanctions busters, wildlife poachers, and human traffickers. Cracking down on illicit flows may be one of the most cost-effective ways we have of advancing development, stability, and human security all at the same time.

It has already been shown that conflict and fragility are some of the greatest challenges to development. USAID’s excellent new discussion paper on “Ending Extreme Poverty in Fragile Contexts” notes the strong correlation between violent conflict and high rates of extreme poverty, with fragile states expected to be home to nearly half of those living under $1.25 a day by 2015. Similarly, as USAID’s Strategy on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance points out, “Poverty is underpinned by poor and undemocratic governance, weak and corrupt institutions, and entrenched power dynamics that lead to political and economic exclusion.”

What the 2014 NSS needs to make clear is that the same policies and programs that address corruption, exclusion, and non-accountable governance will help make development more effective and conflict less likely. We need a much broader conception of what “democracy promotion” really means – as well as a term for it that does not close doors for us around the world – alongside a much stronger capacity to prevent and transform conflicts other than by selling arms, training foreign military forces, or sending in our own troops.

Almost six years ago Gayle Smith, then at the Center for American Progress, authored a marvelous report, “In Search of Sustainable Security,” which was essentially a memo to the future President about what the next National Security Strategy should say. One of the key points she makes is that “America must recalibrate its foreign policy to rely less on military power and more on other tools that can foster change and enhance our security.”

But in order to do this, we can’t simply cut defense spending, although that’s important. We need to ramp up our civilian capacities to prevent violent conflict, both through direct prevention – such as diplomacy, dialogue and sanctions – and through structural prevention – which are long-term interventions to transform key socioeconomic and political institutions.

The 2010 NSS and QDDR both talk about strengthening civilian capacity for conflict prevention and transformation, but in practice both USAID and State treat it as something that is way outside the mainstream, unconnected and incidental to their routine work. The offices that handle these issues are underresourced and underrepresented in the bureaucratic hierarchies, and the work they do is viewed as competing with, and sometimes even at odds with, the priorities of our embassies and missions abroad. The U.S. Institute of Peace is constantly fighting off attempts to eliminate it entirely.

Conflict prevention ought to be one of the main, if not THE main job of the State Department. It’s not a special interest or a side-show, it’s what the entire Foreign Service ought to be trained and equipped to do. Likewise, our efforts at poverty reduction are doomed to failure if USAID does not build its own capacity to help local partners transform power dynamics. A major investment of time and resources will be required to shift the culture as well as the build the knowledge, skills, tools, and incentives to make the United States as effective at peacemaking as we are at warmaking. Ultimately, though, that’s the only way that Diplomacy and Development will ever take their rightful place as full partners at the national security table.